Bill McDermott started the conference by talking at length regarding customer empathy. He candidly spoke of a meeting he had with 30 of the world’s top CIOs and their message to him: SAP has a rock-solid vision, but we have to communicate it to our customers better and in a more personalized way. To achieve this, everything we do, everything we say, everything we create, must stem from an empathetic approach.

As the digital transition for many companies continues, with SAP S/4HANA as the digital core, SAP is committed to greater transparency as it relates to the adoption journey. For more information, please see:

Your Path to SAP S/4HANA – This in-depth look at S/4HANA adoption outlines SAP’s end-to-end vision, complete with the S/4HANA roadmap, migration paths, and more. A PDF version is attached and can also be found on the SAP S/4HANA website.

SAP used SAPPHIRE to launch its new Live business campaign. As Rob Enslin explained on stage, “Live means telling you what’s happening in the moment and cognitively showing the impact on tomorrow and beyond.” The Run Live campaign is backed by more than 40 customer references, including Ageas, City of Toronto, Memebox, Inc, Snohomish County Public Utility District, OC Tanner, Faurecia and Ache Laboratorios.

SAP and Microsoft Usher in New Era of Partnership to Accelerate Business Transformation in the Cloud

Appearing on the keynote stage with CEO Bill McDermott, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke to the strengthening partnership between SAP and Microsoft and the imperative for customers to move to the cloud. With SAP HANA on Azure, organizations across all industries will be able to deliver mission-critical applications and data analytics on a global scale with enterprise-grade security and compliance. Working together, the companies are certifying SAP HANA to run development, test and production workloads on Microsoft Azure. Further, integrations between Microsoft Office 365 and SAP cloud solutions, including Concur, SAP Fieldglass, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Ariba solutions, will bring Office 365 communications, collaboration, calendar and data to the SAP solutions in support of better employee productivity. Finally, this announcement also shared that SAP will enable its customers to build and deploy custom SAP Fiori apps for HTML5 on SAP HANA Cloud Platform with an open standards plug-in framework. As part of this framework, customers can build apps that can be managed with Microsoft Intune.

SAP® BusinessObjects™ Delivers Modern Analytics for the Digital Enterprise

Returning to a strong analytics brand, SAP announced that its entire portfolio of analytics solutions from SAP is being updated to use the existing “BusinessObjects” brand beyond business intelligence. This new portfolio also include new features and capabilities in its analytics solutions portfolio for both its cloud and on-premise offerings as well as a new software-as-a-service offering and the recent acquisition of Roambi technology. New mobile, predictive, data visualization and big data analytics capabilities, as well as simpler packaging and promotions will be made available to help deliver business value and innovation throughout an organization.

Reflecting SAP’s personal commitment to diversity in the workforce, SAP announced it will build new capabilities within its SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite to help improve workplace diversity, made possible through HANA text mining and machine learning. Further, with the launch of a new SAP Diversity and Inclusion Customer Advisory Group, SAP will work with customers and D&I experts to identify how technology can support inclusiveness. Customers include Erste Group Bank, McCormick & Company, New York Life, Royal Bank of Canada and Varian Medical Systems. This is the initiative aims to help companies review job descriptions, performance reviews and similar people processes for potential bias and suggest changes to encourage equity.

Additional press announcements released at SAPPHIRE

Leading Companies Trust SAP To Transform Their Businesses and Run Live read more

New Release of SAP HANA® Enables Customers to Innovate at Enterprise Scale read more